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The Pittsburgh Penguins arrived home in the wee hours of Saturday morning in a state of shock.

A dream season ended with their worst nightmare.

Swept out of the Stanley Cup playoffs by the Boston Bruins before they even had a chance to get to the big dance, the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference will spend time dissecting what went so wrong when the club should have been at its best.

After a 1-0 loss to the Bruins in Game 4 Friday at TD Garden, the Penguins will gather Sunday for one final time to hold a meeting and clean out their lockers before they go their separate ways for what will be a long summer.

“Every year for us when you don’t reach the final it’s a fail,” said Pittsburgh defenceman Kris Letang, a Norris Trophy candidate who was terrible against the Bruins.

“We have the assets to go far every year, and the management and the owners always help us to create a good team. So it’s always a failwhen we don’t get to our goal.”

Now the question is who will pay for this?

League sources told QMI Agency the Pittsburgh ownership group, which includes former great Mario Lemieux, isn’t the pleased with the way the season ended and that may mean coach Dan Bylsma is on the hotseat.

But Bylsma will have the support of the players. That wasn’t the case in New York when the Rangers sent John Tortorella packing after Round 2

Being behind the Penguins’ bench is a plum job with likes of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, James Neal, Chris Kunitz, Pascal Dupuis and Letang amongst a talented group that added extra pieces at the trade deadline.

Knowing the window of opportunity is closing, general manager Ray Shero went shopping at the deadline and added Jarome Iginla (Calgary Flames), Brenden Morrow (Dallas Stars) and Douglas Murray (San Jose Sharks) to help the club get over the top.

Shero may have been motivated by the fact he didn’t want the Bruins to get their clamps into either Iginla or Morrow so the Penguins acquired both of them. In the end, it turned out Boston GM Peter Chiarelli had the last laugh.

Those decisions by the Penguins raised the expectations and many were already planning the parade route.

“Our team is a team that considers itself a team capable of winning a Stanley Cup, put together to win a Stanley Cup,” said Bylsma. “That’s our expectation from day one.

“That’s how we build through the season. We certainly feel that we were a team that was capable of winning a Stanley Cup. Coming up short from that, there’s no question it’s disappointing. No question, you feel like with the expectations that we have on ourselves, that the team has for this group, no question you’re going to look at this as a missed opportunity.”

Shero will have to shift his roster even if Bylsma stays. A league executive told QMI Agency he expects the Penguins to either move Kunitz or Neal with the cap going down to make room to keep Malkin, who is only one year from being an unrestricted free agent.

Wingers Pascal Dupuis and Matt Cooke are both unrestricted free agents July 5. Shero will have tough decisions to make because he can’t keep everybody. Crosby and Malkin eat up a lot of cap space, which limits what the club can do.

On defence, Murray will be allowed to walk away as a free agent because the Penguins want to keep Letang. Then there’s goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, who has two years left on his contract and and is owed $11 million.

The Penguins can go one of two ways with Fleury: They can try to trade him to the Minnesota Wild, Colorado Avalanche or Florida Panthers, or buy out the last two years of the deal and head in another direction. Pittsburgh could pitch for Buffalo Sabres netminder Ryan Miller.

The Pittsburgh players know changes are coming.

“It’s not my choice. I don’t have any control over that,” said Kunitz. “We know that we didn’t accomplish our goal.”

The Penguins fell far short.

“I don’t think we can be satisfied with losing in the conference final,” said veteran goalie Tomas Vokoun. “You look at the personnel we have and what ownership did at the deadline and we just didn’t get it done.”

Now, the Penguins are done with so many questions lingering and left to be answered before training camp in September.